Going Home
by peril
Summary: Pippin has realities to deal with after coming home from the quest about his past and his home life
1. Getting There

Getting home, it seemed, was longer and much less bearable than the entire journey had been. Home seemed so far away, but with no obstacles or obligations blocking it. Anticipation hung at the edges of their throats like a fat red strawberry at the skinny end of the stem. If only a couple mountains and valleys didn't have to be a thousand miles…

The stale feeling of wait was mitigated by small stories of childhood, old songs, or sentences often beginning with "First thing I'm goin'ta do once I get home…" Often words were sweeter when one spoke of a girl that they could only hope waited long enough for their return.

Through all this, Pippin was being quieter than usual. It was known to the other three that Pippin has his quiet, pensive days, and then he had his loud, obnoxious days. Be it from lack of sleep, excess of exercise or homesickness, today was one of those quiet days. As the Shire grew nearer and nearer the excitement grew in the hearts of the others, he became more and more solemn. Rather than irritate Pippin, Merry decided to wait this mood out.

Something was more bothersome than being tired and sore from days of travel. Though even only a month ago Pippin had been more impatient than any other to be home, so recently he began to see it from a different perspective. Home wasn't just seeing the his sisters again, it wasn't just the parties and the friends and… Diamond. It wasn't just all that. It was adjusting to the fact that he had been gone for a long, long time. He had left his sisters and mother completely alone with his father.

It was so soon that he would have to step back inside the home where he left so readily so long ago.


	2. Background Check

Background Check

Years ago, when Pippin was just entering his young adulthood, he had started realizing the differences between what was a normal lifestyle and what was, dare he think, unhealthy. Before, everything that happened to him struck him as a common occurrence between every family. Daddies hit the boys and girls when they were bad. Sometimes the children didn't even have to be bad, just take it and don't tell anybody. That's what he had been told. Take it and don't tell anybody. The scar on his shoulder was, from that certain day and every day since, a scar obtained from falling out of a tree. The day he broke his arm was because he was being bad and was trying to reach a high drawer on the dresser, and it fell on him.

Then he started to realize that Merry never had stories of his dad hitting and beating him. Pippin kept to himself, now almost embarrassed of his problem. He felt weak and alone (save his sisters, who felt nearly the same wrath but only half as often, as Pippin had a way with displeasing his father).

Merry had become suspicious. The same stories of falling out of trees and running into doors had been overused, and especially due to the fact that Pippin never got in quite as much trouble when he wasn't around. Even in the youngest years of Pippin, Merry's mother had her own sneaking suspicions. One time in particular (at about five or six years into his life) that she remembered was when she was changing his shirt and on his upper back was a large and, how else to describe it, an awful burn. Either by accident or otherwise this child had been pressed against a red-hot stove pan (hence the familiar logo found on most locally made cookware). She remembered the tiny wince he had made when she lightly brushed her hand against it, and when asked about it he looked to the ground and quietly but assertively said, "I fell."

There wasn't ever really much worse than the time his father had grabbed him and pressed the pan to his back. It was a drunk impulse, and it would have never happened if Pippin hadn't been eating in his room as he had been told not to time and time again. Therefore, there was really no need to report it.

As he grew older, realities began to hit harder. Entering his tween years, at the beginning of his knowledge of sexuality, he endured the psychological pain that came from the abuse of his sisters.


	3. Pippin's POV

Pippin's POV

I slid the blanket off again and moved to the edge of my bed where I hadn't already gotten the sheets warm. I flipped over the pillow, exposing the cool side to my cheek. It was so warm that I couldn't sleep. I knew my older sister Vinca couldn't either. Her room was right across the hall from mine and she had been tossing and turning in the horrible heat as long as I had. I couldn't see her from here but her bed was a miserable squeaker. It must have been near midnight. All the doors in the house were open to give false hope of some godly breeze that would come sweeping through at any minute. In the meantime, sweat beads clung to my forehead as I pushed my blanket further to the edge of the bed. I tiny light from the end of the hallway peeked through my doorway. All I remember at that point was something cutting in front of it, and my door slammed shut.

At first I wasn't suspicious of anything. Maybe Pearl or Pimpernel had been having a bad night, even though last I knew they were both in bed. Mother didn't every lash out violently at anything, she was the kind to bottle up anger and hold in every thought and word, and absorb every hit silently. Father hadn't treated any of us wrongly in at least a month, the last time being that he found Pimpernel kissing a lad from a lower caste family and he locked her in her room for a day.

I got up slowly and slid my feet to the door. Whoever slammed this would be halfway down the hall and maybe I could at least know who it was. I reached for the handle and as soon as my fingers touched the cold brass I heard a muffled shriek from the room across the hall.

My head snapped up, door still closed, hand gripping the doorknob. I was afraid to run in too quickly, if it was what I feared, that would do nothing but anger my father more. I slowly and silently rotated the doorknob, my hand slipping on the sweat. I pushed open the door and found her door closed in front of mine. I could hear muffled sobbing as I crossed the hallway. It was dark, with a small candle lit at the very end that sprinkled a tiny reflection on the brass knob in front of me. The knob on the door was all I could see and I took it as providence. I reached for it, my arm cutting off the reflection and for a brief second the entire door was pitch black. I pushed the door open gently.

There was a candle lit in the far corner of the room, and otherwise the room was completely dark. My father had his back to me; he was pushing Vinca against the wall with his hand covering her mouth. I moved forward, my eyes searching for an object to strike with. The floorboards creaked but it went unnoticed over her muffled screams. All I could find for a suitable weapon of choice was a hairbrush. At this point I wished sincerely that I had thought of this before entering the room. She struggled underneath the weight that he pressed against her. I grabbed the wooden hairbrush and prepared to strike when he made the choice of pushing my sister to the bed. He turned around, pushing her towards it, when he froze. He saw me standing barely four feet away from him.


	4. Accept It

Pippin's POV

My father glared at me with bloodshot eyes. He looked like a monster from a fairytale. He was dirty, sweaty, and his breath smelled like beer. But oddly enough, amidst the red was a brilliant green that almost twinkled in the candlelight. I couldn't hit my father, who was I to try? He succeeded every time. I'd fail, and he'd be the victor, and the more I tried the more it would hurt in the end.

He grunted and threw my sister to the bed, discarding her like yesterday's trash. He moved toward me and slapped me hard across the face with the back of his calloused hand. My cheek stung, I could feel blood from where my lip made contact with my teeth.

"Look at me, boy." He grunted. I raised my chin and met his angry gaze. For a moment we stood there in silence, his pride defeating mine. "Just can't mind your own business, can you?"

He grabbed my wrist and plucked the brush from my hand like a weed in the garden.

"Out with you." He said.

"Leave my sisters alone-" I managed to say, barely audibly. The back of his other hand met the other side of my face even harder than the last time, and this time his wedding ring made a cut in my cheek. I wouldn't have left if I hadn't realized that he was following me out into the hall. I walked as slowly and I could let myself. My body pressed me to run. My father closed my sister's door; I turned around in time to see Vinca watching me with agony in her eyes. She was defeated, and as a result, so was I.

It was this point in my memory that I've always failed to comprehend. I accepted my loss, and I walked slowly into my room, bracing for a beating. Instead, my father closed my door softly behind me, and I heard him walk down the hall. He was gone for three days after.

My mother smiled the next morning and told me he had never come home that night, that he had left for business and he wouldn't be back for a while.


	5. Angel of the Past

To the Present:

Pippin stood outside the circular door of his old Great Smials home, his heart rising up to his throat. Sweat beads formed on his forehead, and his hands were shaking. This was it… he had anticipated it for so long, so why was it so hard to open the door? What was it like inside? Would they accept him back? Of course, but where was his father? Would Pippin get hit? Or had everything changed?

His mind was a wasp's nest, swarming with painful questions and chaos. Were they even home?

He gritted his teeth and grabbed the doorknob so hard that it hurt. In an oddly calm way he pushed the door open. It whined on its hinges and lazily swung inward. Pippin took one step inside, immediately soaking in memories from only years ago. The parlor he used to see every day was only feet to the right of him. The furniture hadn't been budged. The blanket his grandmother had worked for a year on was laid straight across the top of the couch. On the mantle over the stone fireplace, the poppet Pearl had made was propped against the pewter candlesticks that grandfather Adalgrim had specially made. It was dustless, as you would expect the Thain's house to be.

The coat hooks were in the small indentation to the left. They hung bare like the bars of a gridiron. Of course, who needs a coat in this weather?

Straight ahead was the hallway. He had passed through so casually thousands of times, but now it was so difficult. Though the sun was shining through the windows in the parlor, the hallway was a continuous shadow, eerie and almost uninviting.

A noise came from the kitchen. It was the clacking sound of pots and pans. Someone was home today, and so unaware that the child who had gone missing was stepping silently into the hall. His heart jumped. He tiptoed toward the kitchen and peered inside. The light was spewing through the westward facing window in the kitchen. The glow held a relief, Pimpernel, with her back to the doorway, was mixing something in a bowl on the other side of the room. She paused for a moment to reach a pot from a cabinet to her right. She stretched up, a flower in the rays of the sun, and brought it down to the space of counter that she was using. Pimpernel was the most uniquely beautiful of his three sisters. She had slim, sweet, soft features, from her deep green eyes to her loosely curled light brown hair.

She busily sorted through a drawer of utensils. Pippin tiptoed into the kitchen, his throat swelling with a wonderful excitement. Here he was, only inches away from his beloved older sister whom he had missed so dearly.

"Do we not still hire people to do that kind of work?" he said casually. She jumped and twirled around. First she looked puzzled, then her jaw dropped and her hands flew to cover her mouth.

"Pippin!" She smiled and leapt towards him. She squeezed him tightly and pulled him away from a moment to study his face. He was now much taller, and had older features. He looked so tired and aged… Then she embraced him again.

"Oh my god!" She gasped. "Where _were _you?" Then she pulled him in front of her again. "Are you all right?" Pimpernel franticly studied the small knife wound he had below his jawbone. She ran her fingers through his hair, which with time had grown a darker brown and straightened a bit, as had his father's at his age.

"It's such a long story-" Pippin laughed. "I'm fine, Pinn!" He said as she began to roll up his sleeves and check for more visible cuts and bruises. He didn't want her to see the one huge stab wound on his shoulder, or the irreparable damage done from being smothered by a troll.

Pimpernel wasn't convinced. She looked horrified. "What the hell happened to you?"

Pippin made more attempts to lighten the mood of their reunion. "Aren't you at all wondering about Frodo, Sam, and Merry?"

"I've got enough to worry about! Isn't a girl's brother a bit more of a concern than cousins and friends? Pippin- does anyone else know you're home?"

"You're the first I've seen of our family."

"Oh, Pippin… would you be upset? We presumed you to be… Pippin, we had your funeral just months ago, mother was torn apart, father's been gone so often that I'm not even sure he's still alive…"

"How have you, Vinca and Pearl been?" Pippin asked, worriedly.

"Never mind us, please, tell me what happened to you, Ip."

He had almost forgotten the loving name that his sisters had for him. When he was young and couldn't pronounce his own name, he'd introduce himself as Ip, therefore obtaining the name for life.

Hearing it again was as if the angel of his past had kissed his cheek.

If only there were an angel for the future.

Note: Thank you for being so patient, it's hard to update a lot with my work and school schedule.  
Please please please review! They mean so much to me! Tell me honestly, if you think there's something I can work on, I can't improve unless I'm aware of it.

Thank you,

Peril


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